Associations between the Avatar Characteristics and Psychometric Test Results of VK Social Media Users

Abstract

Online social media has an increasing influence on people’s lives, providing tools for communication and self–representation. People’s digital traces are gaining attention as a reflection of their personality traits, enhancing the personality computing tasks in various areas. This study aims at the identification of statistical associations between psychometric scores from three questionnaires—the Big Five Inventory, Plutchik’s Lifestyle Index and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire—and a set of graphical features of avatar images from the VK online social media that include the pixel characteristics from the HSV and RGB color models and the number of persons and faces depicted in an avatar. The problem is considered from the statistical point of view. The dependency between psychometric scores and the number of faces/persons is assessed with the Kruskal–Wallis test with Dunn test pairwise comparisons. The color-pixel characteristics that are associated with the psychometric scores are selected with several fits of the regularized regression with L2 and MCP penalties. The data for the study were collected via a specially developed application for the online social media platform VK. The results of the analysis support existing research on how colors express personality and discover certain color-pixel image characteristics that could be used for personality computing models.